Burning of the HMS Gaspee

On the night of June 9-10, 1772, a group of Providence men led by Abraham Whipple rowed out to the grounded British revenue schooner HMS Gaspee in Narragansett Bay. They shot and wounded the ship's commander, Lieutenant William Dudingston, removed the crew, and burned the vessel to the waterline. The Gaspee had been aggressively enforcing trade regulations and had become deeply unpopular with Rhode Island merchants.

A royal commission of inquiry was established to identify the perpetrators, but no one in Rhode Island would testify. The colony's collective silence was a remarkable act of organized resistance — more than a year before the Boston Tea Party. The Gaspee affair demonstrated that colonial defiance of British authority had deep roots in Rhode Island.